Let’s Rethink Our Homeless Shelters

By Christine C. Quinn

Jan. 1, 2016

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CreditCreditMichela Buttignol

MORE than 57,000 New Yorkers will sleep in a shelter tonight. In this city of glistening wealth, they lack a permanent place to call home. Thousands more suffer outside the shelter system; they are on the streets, bracing for the bitter cold ahead.

Many in the system are women and children — families comprise two-thirds of those in shelters. Nine of 10 homeless families are led by women, many of whom have fled domestic violence. Nearly a third of these women are employed. But their low-wage jobs leave them unable to afford the city’s skyrocketing rents.

At Win, the nonprofit I lead, we serve the women and children who are the forgotten face of homelessness in New York. They are mothers and grandmothers and aunts and sisters. They work long hours and make sacrifices few of us can fathom, all to give their children and grandchildren a chance to tap the well of dignity inside each of us and break the cycle of homelessness. They are our neighbors, our fellow New Yorkers. Yet, all too often, we fall short of treating and housing New York’s homeless thoughtfully and with care.

Three weeks ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a 90-day comprehensive review of city services for the homeless, and a laudable new initiative, Home-Stat, to combat street homelessness. This is an important step to address some of the most visible manifestations of our homelessness crisis. But more is needed.

New York has a different agency or office that focuses on just about every challenge homeless families face. Yet little is done to coordinate these services toward the goal of providing permanent housing.

Nearly all of those in our shelters are eligible for city-funded housing vouchers. But the agency that oversees cash assistance, which includes vouchers, and job-readiness efforts, the Human Resources Administration, is not the one in charge of shelters. Shelters are instead run by the Department of Homeless Services.

We need to combine those two agencies. Until the mid-1990s, services for the homeless were under the purview of the human resources commissioner, and they should be again. This change would be a recognition that homelessness is not an isolated problem; it interacts with, and is a consequence of, a maelstrom of factors — unaffordable rents, insufficient job training, lack of accessible child care, untreated mental illness and substance abuse, and too few stable work opportunities.

Our current shelter system is a hodgepodge of repurposed manufacturing sites and rickety apartment buildings. In the past 20 years, only one new shelter in the system — Win’s facility on Glenwood Road in Brooklyn — has been built with families in mind. We need to reimagine our shelters — and, yes, open new ones — so that they can offer the holistic services that are critical to equipping homeless families with the skills and treatment they need.

Shelters should have free on-site G.E.D. preparation classes and exams. They should offer vocational training programs and job placement support, targeting growth industries where well-paying jobs are most likely to be available. The city could further help by partnering with companies and labor unions to create paths to economic security.

Some of these shelters should be built under the same roof as permanent housing and community spaces, to provide a continuum of care and a connection with the neighborhood as well as to leverage existing community resources.

Opening new shelters will put thousands of affordable apartments back on the market. For years, the city has rented apartments and even paid for hotel rooms as temporary shelter units. These apartments and hotel rooms are scattered throughout the city, leaving the homeless without on-site access to support services. The city pays landlords more than someone with a rental voucher can pay, which only exacerbates New York’s already severe housing shortage. More than 3,000 homeless families are housed in apartments that could be permanent homes.

Adding quality, integrated shelter capacity and forcing landlords to put up “for rent” signs on these scattered apartments will make more units affordable to working families. This should be a core piece of the mayor’s aggressive housing plan.

Another critical focus area is the aftercare services that help families move from shelters to permanent housing. The city has an effective model in Brooklyn, Home to Stay, which provides customized care that gradually decreases in intensity as families become more independent. It should be scaled citywide.

We need to learn from what works — and eliminate what does not, including a web of rules, regulations and laws that run counter to the interests of the homeless. For example, domestic violence survivors who seek refuge in an emergency shelter should not be uprooted and moved elsewhere after 180 days. This counterproductive policy makes no sense. We should change it.

Homelessness is among our city’s most daunting challenges, but it is not intractable. To work with homeless women and children is to be inspired by the grit of mothers who strive daily to improve their kids’ circumstances.

They will never accept that better is impossible. Neither can we.

Christine C. Quinn is president and chief executive officer of Win (formerly Women in Need).